Microsoft"s nine-year-old operating system, Windows Vista, will stop receiving updates in exactly one year from now. Luckily for Microsoft, most users abandoned Vista a long time ago when they made the move to the superior Windows 7 and therefore the company won"t have to make too much of an effort to convert people to Windows 10.
Mainstream support for Vista ended four years ago during April 2012, and has since only been receiving security updates, it didn"t even get new versions of Internet Explorer after version 9. With security updates being dropped, users will be much more susceptible to malware and should therefore migrate to a new version of Windows.
Windows Vista was released to the general public at the start of 2007, at the time, it received a lot of condemnation based on the hardware people needed to run the newly introduced Aero theme. Another issue with Vista, which drove people away, was the incessant notifications thrown up by the then-new security feature, User Account Control (UAC).
UAC"s purpose was to ensure users knew that they were installing new software, which would supposedly make the installation of malware more difficult. In practice however, it doesn"t provide any security because people clicked to continue anyway.
For Vista readers wondering what to do about upgrading, you"ll have to buy a license for a copy of Windows 10 or other supported version. Windows 10 is still gratis for users until July 29 but only for those coming from Windows 7 or 8.1.